Hold on, Sauron: Amazon reportedly leaked false Rings of Power rumors on purpose

Last month, we reported on an absolutely bonkers bunch of rumors that had leaked about the second season of Amazon's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Sauron has a son! Tom Bombadill and Goldberry are Morgoth and Ungoliant reborn! Gandalf will meet Shadowfax! On the whole, these rumors were pretty crazy. Even if some felt like they may have held a seed of truth, most sounded far too outlandish to be true.

As it turns out, they probably were. Fellowship of Fans, a popular Lord of the Rings fansite which was the first to break those rumors, has issued a statement today: it's come to their attention that Amazon intentionally leaked fake plot details for The Rings of Power season 2. "FoF has been made aware of a long term plan carried out over roughly the last 6 months by the production and team members of The Rings of Power to release and spread false rumours pertaining to season 2," it reads. "From what we understand this attempt was to catch out people who were leaking in the crew and to make sure in future that outlets would be leaking out wrong information."

While this sort of maneuvering isn't totally unheard of, it's also a little silly in my opinion that Amazon felt the need to leak false rumors. I don't really recall Rings of Power season 1 having a big problem with leaked information. Yes, some shows have done this before, such as when the Game of Thrones cast and crew insisted Kit Harington's character Jon Snow was definitely, most certainly dead ahead of season 6. But that seems like a far cry from someone attached to The Rings of Power telling fans on 4Chan that Tom Bombadil will appear as an incarnation of OG Dark Lord Morgoth. (And yes, I'm just assuming that Bombadil/Morgoth is one of the false rumors because did anyone actually even believe it in the first place?)

But hey, if it helps Amazon make sure there are no Wormtongues whispering their secrets, I guess I can't blame them. They'd know if they have a spy problem better than I would.

At the end of the day, we know less about The Rings of Power season 2 than we did before — which is very little, since Amazon has yet to release any official information about the series despite the fact that we're expecting it to air sometime this year. Stay tuned.

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